He mounted the dusty stairs, with Peter sweating after him, and in the wide, many-tabled hall of the Jew, heavy with the arid lushness of a summer night in the city, he drank himself into a heroic insensibility, so that he had to be carried away to dark T Wharf, in the willing hands of the fish fleet, and dumped aboard a schooner bound down on the morning tide for the end of the Cape. They opened the town around Long Point, a straggling arc of infinitesimal houses and wharves and spires, all colored alike in the sulphur fires of sunset, with here and there a gleam of clear flame refracted from a windowpane, a whole broadside from the cold-storage in the western sands. “Seven month,” Peter mused, an eye cornerwise on the silent man beside him in the bows. “Seven month; and it’s like yiste’day--er mebby ten, twenty year, lookin’ at it another way, eh, Cap’n?” “They’ll be took aback,” Va Di muttered, rousing himself from his sour preoccupation. “I’m goin’ to see the Silvado girls tonight, Peter. You watch their faces, now. Fish into the water--I guesso.” He fell into another silence, broken only by the faint rustle of the cutwater and the tiny crescendo of men’s voices as the bow gang straggled forward to make the anchor ready. The fleet at mooring drifted nearer, spiring purple on a mat of pellucid gold. “I see Maya’s shifted his offshore trap,” Peter struggled patiently. The tide was low when the dories came ashore, leaving a wide stretch of flats, soggy, half-reflecting. Two of the crew, to tell of it afterward, carried Va Di on their shoulders and saved his white shoes from the wet, their own boots leaving tiny lakes behind, full of yellow sky. A bare-legged girl with a clam-rake in her hand turned curiously as she crossed in front of them, opened her eyes wider, ran away blushing richly, the damp skirts flinging about her knees. Va Di called after her: “Ai there, you Angie! You watch out for me.” People began to come out on the stranded wharves; some padded across the flats, hallooing to one another. At the “rising,” Va Di kicked to be let down, and stood with the great hat held dramatically across his breast, watching the townspeople converging upon him. A party of summer visitors from the East End passed in a motor; one of them, a handsome woman of forty or so, smiled amusedly at the figure, flushed and tightened her lips as she found her smile returned with a shocking candor, made to pluck her companion’s sleeve, thought better of it, lowered her eyes to her lap, and so whirled on into nothingness. “Le’ me alone,” Va Di cried with a sudden ferocity. “Peter, gi’ me that dress-suit case.” Grasping the shiny thing he wheeled and strode away into the mouth of a lane, leaving lips and eyes wondering behind him.